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In this section you will find campaigns, big and small, that you may want to join. Every bit of help is good to raise awareness of free formats and Open Media.

Contents

Join Them

Folding@home

Ever heard of Folding@home? It's a program that uses unused CPU cycles of your computer to do calculations and simulations of protein folding. What it means is that you can help the scientific community to find out how to heal certain illnesses while promoting the use of Open Media.

Yeah! Join our team of "folders" and, while your computer is on, you help science and you help the SOM cause, as the teams with the more active members show up high in the F@H site statistics.

How do you do it? Simple.

If you already use F@H, just use the number 84717 as your team.

If you have never used F@H, go to the Stanford's web site and dowload the client for your Operating System. During setup, you'll have to choose a username and, optionally, a team. Add 84717 as the number of your team.

MailOgging

Operation Transcode

One of the biggest obstacles for Open Media is the lack of it not only out there but even in your own computer. This needs to change, and YOU can help.

You already have some content in your computer, be it music, podcasts, videos, office documents, etc. All you have to do is convert it to a free format and (if it's legal for you to do it) share it with other people.

If you have music, you should convert it to either Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. Look into OggDropXPd and dbpoweramp.

If you have films, clips, anything video you should convert it to Ogg Theora. ffmpeg2theora and Thoggen will be of use to you.

If you have office documents that are not OpenDocument, you know what to do. OpenOffice.org and KOffice will help you in this task.

If you have podcasts, you should convert them to Speex. dbpoweramp or VLC may be ideal for this delicate procedure.

This is, without any doubt, the most important step you can take to promote Open Media. Do it. Now.

Sing songs of praise to Operation Transcode. Help your friends (who don't think you're crazy) to do the same thing. Help make the world a better place. And next time you see that stray dog by the road, give him a pat in the head.

Share the Funnies

Some people just love to get jokes and funny movies in their email, and then send them around to their friends and colleagues in a never-ending cycle. But PowerPoint presentations and WMVs don't help the Open Media cause, do they?

Still, shouldn't we take the opportunity to promote free formats where possible? Yes. And it's so simple.

If you have people sending you funnies, convert them to free formats and resend. If you have imagination to create your own, then do so. The sky's the limit, they say.

Another thing you can do is to include a link as a sort of email signature to the more popular application that deals with that format. Say, if it's a Theora file you should point people to the Windows codecs , so nobody complains.

Some people will likely complain. "Why didn't you send it in X format? It's more popular," they might say. Don't fall for that. Right now, it may take a bit more work to get Open Media working than, say, WMV, but in time the situation will change. And to get there we need lots of people working with free formats. This is one more thing you can do to help.